LUKE HARDING, ‘THE MOLOTOV COCKTAILS THROWN BY UNDERCOVER POLICE’

TURKEY – Luke Harding is an award-winning foreign correspondent for The Guardian Newspaper. On 11 June 2013 he wrote an article about the events that are taking place in Turkey. In the article Luke Harding stated that, on Friday and Saturday Recep Tayyip Erdoğan hosted an EU meeting in Istanbul. Once his European guests left the country he sent in riot police to clear the demonstrators who have been peacefully occupying Taksim Square for the last 12 days.

Here is a section from Luke Harding’s description of the event that took place on 11 June 2013;

“And so it proved, with police encircling the square at 6am on Tuesday, firing rubber bullets and teargas, and ripping down banners calling for Erdoğan’s resignation. By happy coincidence, Turkey’s state media, which for days had blithely ignored the country’s huge anti-government demonstrations, were on hand to record the event.

Turkish TV viewers witnessed this: a small group of four or five “demonstrators” throwing molotov cocktails at police. At one point they advanced on police lines in a comic Roman-style phalanx while holding the flag of a fringe Marxist party. The “protesters” were in fact middle-aged undercover police officers, staging a not very plausible “attack” on their own for the benefit of the cameras.

But the violence meted out against the genuine protesters camped out under the plane trees of nearby Gezi Park was real enough. Dozens were left choking or injured as teargas billowed across central Istanbul. Meanwhile, some 50 lawyers acting for detained activists were themselves dragged away by police and roughed up at Istanbul’s Çağlayan court.”